There's something brittle, delicate and simultaneously course about the off-putting refinement of Jane Fonda. Long brown hair, her father's features, an athlete's body and crisp speech pattern make her a marm and a prude. In certain circumstances she can also be pinched or castrating, perhaps even cruel, but the layers of her personality are somewhat more complex and tender than what's given common view in tokens like "Hanoi Jane" or Barbarella.

Likewise John Voight is boyishly handsome with barely suppressed sexual magnetism. Roundish cheeks, blonde hair, a winning smile and open personality mark him as someone to know and approach. He seems like a nice guy absent any malice of intention and it's this quality of forgiveness attached to his never questionable masculinity that makes him attractive and charismatic.

Imagine, then, their alchemical combination in Coming Home, the Hal Ashby-directed drama combining parallel parts of their respective personas and reversing them for heart-rending effect. She's Sally Hyde, the repressed and confused wife of Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), a Vietnam era marine awaiting his chance to kill commies in country. He's Luke Martin, the high school phantom of Sally's youth turned veteran paraplegic who struggles with his mental and physical health in a stateside VA hospital.

Scored with some of the greatest hits of Motown and late '60s rock, this Academy Award-nominated film is a touching portrait of war and consequence. Its strength is believable writing, strong performances and a microcosm of the Vietnam era played through an insulated group of people brought together by chance circumstances.

Unlike other films of its moment, especially 1978's Oscar winner in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter or Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterwork Apocalypse Now, Coming Home isn't focused on the field of battle. Instead it's centered on the aftermath of war and the transformations required of those done with their fighting alongside those bearing witness to the wounds of body and spirit. It breathes life into the legions of non-hero heroes and the nearly unendurable process of integrating figurative shrapnel from wartime ordinance into the relative safety of home.

Opening just before Bob is sent to the hot zone, the Hydes are a couple on the brink of collapse. He's a warmonger itching to test his masculinity and she's frightened of losing him to the clip of a VC bullet. Together they fulfill an old-fashioned model of family with him in the work force and her keeping the home fires warm for his safe return.

When Bob leaves for his tour Sally strikes up a friendship with Viola "Vi" Munson (Penelope Milford), the girlfriend of her husband's friend, Sergeant Dink Mobley (Robert Ginty). With time on her hands and unpleasant worries in her mind as a military wife, Sally volunteers at the VA hospital where Vi is a nutritionist and begins her metamorphosis from a wallflower into a self-determined modern woman.

In the midst of sorting bedpans, pouring coffee and primping pillows, she bumps into Luke who was someone she admired in high school. Now, some years later, he's convalescing, trying to learn how to manage his paralyzing spinal cord injury sustained while leading his platoon into battle. He's feisty, disagreeable and deeply troubled by the senselessness of his experience in Southeast Asia. Yet he's also needy and sensitive to circumstance, enough so that he recognizes a kindred neediness in Sally who's waiting for news of her husband.

Eventually they strike up a friendship, though Luke doubts her sincerity as nothing more than a way to prepare for Bob's return, possibly in a body bag. With passing days and weeks their friendship becomes a mutual struggle for self-transformation. Luke learns to accept his injury through Sally's no-nonsense support while she learns to fulfill herself under the glow of his attention and encouragement. They fall in love, eventually make love and share passions not strictly based on body affection.

Like a lost man at sea, though, Bob hosts his wife for a brief visit in Asia and displays the fissures of unfulfilled ambition that are his lot in life. Unable to assimilate the horrors of battle with the requirements of his marriage, he's a failure as a husband and warrior.

Sally intuitively know her life with Bob is forever changed, but that she's committed to him and to his safe return when his tour is ended. Returning stateside she gets a perm, buys a new car, leaps headlong into her career of volunteerism and becomes the sort of active person her husband never wanted or craved.

Luke finally leaves the hospital but returns to helplessly witness the suicide of Vi's younger brother, Bill Munson (Robert Carradine), another troubled veteran who found life in America too difficult to bear. Reacting to Bill's tragic passing Luke chains himself to the gates of a marine recruitment center thereby awakening a political interest and inviting the ire of the federal government. His nascent pacifism slowly awakens to post-war possibilities where he can fight his battles with words and not bullets or bayonets.

When Bob unexpectedly returns home a hero, but one with an accidentally self-inflicted wound, the conflicts of Sally's two loves becomes clear. All the more so when Bob is shown pictures of Sally of Luke together since Luke has been surveilled by the government as a provocateur and threat to national security following his attempt to close down the recruitment center.

Confronting his wife after several drunken binges and hysterical outbursts, Bob breaks with reality and approaches Sally with a gun. Screaming about the war and her betrayal, his own impotence and lack of control, Luke intervenes to try and catalyze Bob's recovery before moving out of their life altogether. As Sally and Vi go shopping for groceries in their tentative return to normalcy, Bob strips naked and swims to his doom in the great, wide, Pacific Ocean while Luke speaks to a group of high school students about the reality of war and the conflicting calls of patriotism.

Tagged with the flip line, "A man who believed in war! A man who believed in nothing! And a woman who believed in both of them!" Coming Home is something more than a romance and something less than a war movie. Not beholden to the normal cues of a sweeping symphonic score, exotic locales and often whispered "I love yous", it's defined by its Vietnam context that's used as a structuring fable about love and forgiveness, change and stasis, war and peace. There is no happy ending, no final standoff against bad guys storming the trenches and with this connection of disparate genres Ashby's film succeeds magnificently.

Over the years Coming Home has also managed to be that brand of historical artifact that speaks to its moment as well as to future generations. It's indeed caught within the cycle of mid- to late-'70s political reactions to earlier times but its lessons, emotions and artistic integrity are timeless and impressive regardless of comparison with other films about the American War in Vietnam. Owing to the script by Nancy Dowd, Robert C. Jones and Waldo Salt, the characters are able to voice ideological impressions of war but they're always, first and foremost, people struggling to find a way to survive the peace.

Perhaps in comparison to other Vietnam movies Coming Home shines all the more with its disruption of traditional notions about star power and war films. By rendering Fonda an adulteress without a personality and Voight a urine-bag carrying paraplegic, these two actors made creative leaps that were outright persona reversals. Not just because the roles ignored much of their hard won star value but also because the parts forced them to occupy screen time as Sally and Luke, two symbols of a wider America experience of Vietnam.

Thus Sally and Luke are ideas as well as characters. They are halves of a bruised soul finding solace in the acceptance and discovery of tenderness and affection. Moreover they are aspects of war told through the daily struggles of people not present in the theater of battle but who, through association and sacrifice, are forced to handle themselves with humility and forgiveness as victims of the war just the same.

Of course there is a moral hole at the center of the film. Sally does cheat on her husband. And though Bob is almost a hawkish cipher for masculine posturing run amuck, it doesn't excuse her infidelity to say he's a troll without enough regard for her needs or experience.

That Luke is so appealing is a factor of his disability and of Voight's skill as an actor. Sexual pity too plays a role in his charismatic performance that can't help but be read into Sally's affection for a wheelchair-bound hero. Still, it's enough to admit that Luke's neutral qualities and loneliness are somehow universal, worthy of rewarding his better qualities with love and the joys of companionship, especially since he ends up a fundamentally moral person.

In the final analysis, Coming Home is a minor masterpiece. Long celebrated for its writing and lead performances, it's also unfettered by its liberal guilt in criticizing war, any war, as an unnecessary evil stemming from misplaced national self-interest. Though this commentary is everywhere present in the film, the honesty and complexity of Sally and Luke's struggle redeem any propagandistic element in the production. Aside from presenting a left-leaning soapbox the film offers a vision of war without napalm, nighttime raids or the terrors of hellishly heroic bloodshed. Simply put, Coming Home presents a war of emotions, scars and memories as potent as any bandoliers, air cavalry raids or bouncing Betties ever could be.